by Thomas Maier
Chapter Five
Brahmins and Bigotry
FOR CHILDREN of Irish Catholic immigrants, the Boston City Census Report in the 1850s ensured that bigotry began at birth. Although these infants were born in the United States, the official tally didn’t record them as real Americans. The Kennedy children, P. J. Kennedy and his older siblings, Mary, Joanna and Margaret, were officially classified as “foreigners”— in effect, strangers in their own land.
Their “outsider” status was spelled out in bureaucratic language:“Although many of them were born in this country, yet, subject as they are to the control, instruction and associations of their parents, they properly belong to, and are under the influence of the foreign element,” reported the 1855 Boston census. That “foreign element” included the Kennedys and many of their friends and neighbors. Foreigners in Boston—especially those landing from Ireland—soared 194 percent in the five years after 1850, the census determined, accounting for nearly all the city’s growth in population. Ward Two, where the Kennedys lived in East Boston, had the biggest jump of all. To those in power, the political implications were clear.“This fact gives evidence of an awakened interest on the part of those born in foreign countries to avail themselves of the elective franchise,” the census report noted, with bureaucratic understatement. For politics—this “elective franchise”—would help pull the Kennedys out of their poverty.
AS A WIDOW with four young children, Bridget Kennedy and her fractured family endured what must have been insurmountable hardships. The census recorded that the Kennedys took in two boarders—a common method for staying afloat financially—even before Patrick Kennedy’s death. To keep her family from starving, Bridget cleaned for long hours as a maid, an occupation so often filled by Irish Catholic women that the jobs were known derisively as “bridgets” or “biddys.” Maids were virtually invisible, stuck in the lowliest position, watching a life to which they could merely aspire and observe with envy. Yet even these jobs were difficult to get for the Irish. Newspaper ads for maids usually sought out only “Americans” or “Protestant foreigners.” As was true of so many jobs for both sexes, “Irish Need Not Apply” signs and other restrictions pervaded Boston. Uprooted by the Famine, the Irish soon discovered that life in Massachusetts could be harsh and insecure.
They took jobs as railroad laborers, ditch diggers, hod carriers and garbage carters, or as workers in textile mills. A significant portion of their wages went back home to Ireland to help their parents and relatives still reeling from the Famine. Performing dangerous and sometimes deadly tasks, they swung hammers, climbed scaffolds, descended into sewers, hauled cargo as longshoremen and constructed buildings, usually with no safety protections. Dying in alarming numbers, Irish laborers were called a “perishing class” by Boston’s renowned minister, the Reverend Theodore Parker. In an 1846 letter to Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson mentioned his surprise at learning that Irish laborers sweated through fifteen-hour days for fifty cents. Emerson repeated Parker’s observation: he rarely saw a “gray-haired Irishman” because they died so young. Irish women also became tragedies on the job. At the nearby Pemburton Mill in January 1869, 900 workers, most of them immigrant women from Ireland, were caught in a sweatshop fire that caused their overcrowded building to collapse, killing 88 and injuring 116. For the Irish in America, life was as cheap as their wages.
Bridget Kennedy found a relatively safe job at a stationary and notions store in East Boston. With the help of her three daughters and her son, P. J., she scrimped together enough money so that she could eventually buy the thriving establishment. Not far from the ferry, Bridget’s store, housed in a three-story building where her family also lived, soon expanded to include a grocery that apparently sold liquor as well as food to local Irish laborers. With the money she earned, Bridget sent P. J. to Sacred Heart, a school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame, so that he would receive a Catholic education. The young man helped out at the store when not studying. Like his mother, P. J. was hardworking, a quiet teenager whose reserved manner masked his quick and ambitious mind. Based on her own hard experiences, Bridget determined that her only son should seek a better life, the kind she had observed as a lowly domestic working for affluent families in Boston’s ruling Protestant majority. To do that, she and her family would have to overcome not only the bigotry towards Catholics but also the confinement of the immigrant ghetto where they lived.
BOSTON’S IRISH stressed the concepts of community and the family as vehicles for social improvement. This view often grew out of, and was largely supported by, the Catholic themes of pain, sacrifice and religious sacraments that were devoted to some greater good, an ultimate spiritual deliverance from their ordeal. Many immigrants to America during those years— Germans, Italians, Poles and Eastern European Jews—would rely on similar traits as a source of strength. But because the Irish were the first large wave, they set a standard for others to follow. By sticking together, by working as a group, families such as the Kennedys were able to survive the trauma of famine and the harrowing odyssey of the coffin ships. They overcame challenges in the New World that might have defeated them as individuals.
A certain fatalism among the Irish, a despondency about their circumstances, lent itself to further cultural separation. Alcoholism, self-destructive behavior and a stunted social life centered around drink undermined their climb out of the Wharf’s ghetto. In nineteenth-century America, the caricature of a drunken Irishman became a common stereotype. The Irish appeared to lack—at least to the Puritan’s eye—the enterprise and fortitude needed for success. Talk of England’s oppression seemed a sorry excuse for Irish self-destructiveness. “Is the landlord’s absence the reason why the house is filthy, and Biddy lolls on the porch all day?” asked British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. “People need not be dirty if they are ever so idle; if they are ever so poor, pigs and men need not live together.”A fundamentally different worldview existed between Irish Catholics, a lowly flock who deferred to the priest for guidance, and Protestants whose fiercely independent outlook derived largely from their power and success in America. Their basic difference was inherent in religious education and cultural traditions. As historian Kerby Miller observed:“The Catholic Irish were more communal than individualistic, more dependent than independent, more fatalistic than optimistic, more prone to accept conditions passively than to take initiatives for change, and more sensitive to the weight of tradition than to innovative possibilities for the future.”
Nevertheless, such generalities usually failed to consider the devastating impact of bigotry—ethnic prejudices and religious intolerance—on Boston’s Irish Catholic population. Just as in Ireland, the restrictions placed on their social and economic ascendancy were sometimes codified in specific laws. Small suppressions were found in subtle phrases of discrimination and discreet gestures of rebuke. These actions delayed the full impact of Irish Catholics into the American mainstream for years, often for generations. They also seeped into the individual consciousness of many Irish families. The corrosive results were limits on what each could achieve, how they were perceived by others and often what they thought of themselves. The Kennedys were not immune.
From the outset, Boston’s reception to the Irish was wary and distrustful. Mayor Theodore Lyman described the Irish as “a race that will never be infused with our own, but on the contrary, will always remain distinct and hostile.”With thousands of new immigrants descending on its streets, the Yankee Boston of old became defensive, scorning these newcomers as if they were a plague of water rats.“Each wave would distrust the next,” John F. Kennedy later observed about this constant flow of new immigrants. Boston had been accustomed to absorbing fewer than five thousand new immigrants a year; now, it became “the Dublin of America,” as the Reverend Theodore Parker put it, accepting nearly forty thousand new arrivals alone in the year Patrick Kennedy landed. The “Paddyvilles” and “Mick alleys” became the first mass urban slums in the Unit
ed States.
In the pecking order of Boston’s society, the newly arrived Irish were on the bottom rung. Visiting Boston in 1860,Walt Whitman found the Irish were treated worse than Negroes, who lived free in Northern cities but were still enslaved in the South. W.E.B. DuBois, the black scholar, later recalled that, when he was growing up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the 1870s, “the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me.” Some wondered how New England abolitionists— including Harriet Beecher Stowe—appalled by the evil of slavery, could be unmoved by the suffering of the famine Irish and the bigotry against them. The Irish immigrants were perennial outsiders in a town with a rich aristocratic Anglo-Saxon past. In the struggle for jobs and acceptance, they were often the last hired and the most unwelcome. “The Irish found all others united with the natives against them,” observed historian Oscar Handlin.“A Negro was as reluctant to have an Irishman move into his street as any Yankee.”
Anti-Catholic bigotry was not unique to Boston and stretched across much of America. For many Protestants, any endeavor involving Roman Catholics—employment, education, cultural institutions, politics and government— became suspect. During the 1840s, for example, Pope Pius IX followed the example of other European monarchs and sent a block of marble with his regards for the building of the Washington Monument. An angry crowd threw the stone into the Potomac River. In colonial Boston, the long history of anti-Catholicism included “Pope’s Night,” in which floats, wagons and exhibits were devoted to stirring hatred for Catholics, a night capped by burning the Pope in effigy. These views were far from a refuge of the ignorant, for many of New England’s most respected citizens shared a deep-seated distrust of Catholic influence. A person no less than future President John Adams warned about the papists, asserting that the “Roman system” kept human beings “for ages in a cruel, shameful and deplorable servitude.” Many years later, John F. Kennedy noted that Ralph Waldo Emerson, that famed American proponent of individual freedoms, in writing to his friend Thomas Carlyle, expressed worry about “the wild Irish element . . . led by Romanish priests, who sympathize, of course, with despotism.” JFK also underlined that Samuel F. B. Morse, a painter and celebrated inventor of the telegraph, wrote a book called A Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States—a diatribe about an alleged papal conspiracy to infiltrate America with Catholics avowed to do the pontiff ’s bidding.
New England’s history proved it could be a forbidding place to Irish Catholics. Violence dated back to the hanging of Goody Glover in 1688 on Boston Common, found guilty as a witch for saying the rosary in Gaelic while kneeling before a statue of the Virgin Mary. In the summer of 1834— a decade before the famine Irish arrived in droves—local Protestants, alarmed about growing Catholic influence, stormed a convent run by Ursuline nuns in Charlestown, outside Boston, and burned it down. Though most Bostonians were rightly shocked by this incident, religious bias against Irish Catholics persisted. In June 1847, handbills distributed widely in Boston called for the destruction of a hospital treating “foreign paupers”; the campaign was aimed at provoking an uprising of hate similar to the Charlestown convent fire. Even workers toiling as maids, as Bridget Kennedy had, were under suspicion. “Though Bostonians could not do without the Irish servant girl, distrust of her mounted steadily,” observed Handlin. “Natives began to regard her as a spy of the Pope who revealed their secrets regularly to priests in confession.”
The Kennedys arrived in America when rampant anti-Catholicism prompted the creation of the so-called Know-Nothing Party, a national political movement of hate that wrapped itself in the American flag. Starting in 1850, a secret patriotic society called the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner evolved into an open “American Party.”They pledged to vote only for native-born Americans and resisted the influx of immigrants into the United States with a call for a twenty-one-year naturalization period. Their common name arose because members were instructed, when asked about their plans, to answer, “I know nothing about it.” The “Know-Nothings” voiced the deepest fears of many Americans, including concern for out-of-control breeding by Catholics. They had no intentions of allowing papists to outnumber the majority and skew their hard-won culture. In 1854, the Know-Nothings elected six state governors and seventy-five congressmen. Two years later, when the party convinced former President Millard Fillmore to run under their banner, he garnered 25 percent of the vote. Upset by the Know-Nothing Party’s swift political rise, Abraham Lincoln in 1855 confided to a friend that “our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.” Basic freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights, he warned, might be endangered. “When the Know-Nothings get control,” Lincoln cracked, “It will read ‘All men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.’”
Within the Kennedys’ own state of Massachusetts, the Know-Nothings were quite successful, electing in 1854 Governor Henry J. Gardner, the entire membership of the state senate, and all but four seats in the state’s lower house. A long-time nativist, Jerome Van Crowninshield Smith, was elected mayor of Boston. In the state legislature, the Know-Nothings passed laws to make reading the Protestant version of the Bible compulsory in public schools. Some wanted to pass a law prohibiting public office to anyone who expressed allegiance to the Pope. They also pushed anti-immigration measures, including a state literacy test for voters and the exclusion of paupers, that almost gained sufficient support. No Roman Catholic was above suspicion. In 1858, a state legislature committee launched a probe into nunneries to investigate unfounded rumors of sexual improprieties and “certain practices” taking place at Catholic schools, including two run by the Sisters of Notre Dame, the same order who taught at P. J. Kennedy’s school.
Although various Irish leaders suggested keeping a low profile or reacting violently to such outlandish acts of discrimination, Boston’s Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick, a prudent man, advised a different approach. Rather than remain defensive, he urged his parishioners to become naturalized citizens, to vote and to avoid retaliation. Boston would be slow to create a parochial school system because Fitzpatrick believed Catholic children should learn and play in public schools with those of other faiths. Eventually, rising passions surrounding slavery and the impending Civil War in the 1860s eclipsed the Know-Nothing Party, though heated rhetoric and bigotry toward Irish Catholics never went away.
In Boston, the more liberal citizenry were appalled by the Know- Nothings’s hateful actions, but they followed another questionable course. They espoused a doctrine of acculturation for Irish Catholics that, in the words of some state legislators, stressed that the Irish “be as we are.”Though not overtly bigoted, this high-minded appeal carried a subtle message of cultural superiority, an overriding belief that the essential wisdom of Anglo- Saxon society would enlighten and replace the parochial dogmas of Irish Catholics. Many proponents were wealthy and powerful leaders in Boston society—bankers, educators, churchmen and property owners—whom Oliver Wendell Holmes labeled “the Brahmins,” a reference to the preeminent priestly class of the ancient Hindus in India. These Brahmin leaders intended to maintain their positions of power in this modern-day caste system, the implicit message being that the Irish should follow along for their own good. The urge to remake and redefine others in their own image would become a unique trait of American democracy. The Brahmins in Boston were among the first American practitioners of the “melting pot” ideal of assimilation, and for all their expressed good intentions, the difficulties soon became apparent.
Public schools provided the best hope for Brahmins to remake immigrant children in their own image. Even if their parents spoke Gaelic and were unreconstructed foreigners, these children could become ideal products of assimilation—second-generation Americans who would learn to share the values of the Puritans, aspire to the great achievements of the Founding Fathers and never hear of their shiftless ancestors in Ireland. But the Irish proved unwilling pupils. Too often, the Yankee
teachers brought their own prejudices into the classroom, constantly ridiculing and harassing their Catholic pupils. When Boston’s new archbishop, John L. Williams (who years earlier as a young priest had married Patrick and Bridget Kennedy), heard these complaints, he announced plans to create a parochial school system and pull as many Catholic children as possible out of the public schools. The Brahmins were upset, arguing that Catholic schools would only undermine educational standards and indoctrinate children’s minds with religious catechism. The Massachusetts legislature, still controlled by Yankees, even proposed a law creating local education boards to oversee what was taught in Catholic and other private schools. The Brahmins presided with the same high-handedness in local politics. They embraced Protestant Yankee candidates who proposed “good government,” and they resisted all advances by Irish politicians whom they believed to be interested solely in patronage and far too susceptible to graft.
Behind the Brahmin rhetoric of good schools and good government lay some ignoble fears. As Irish Catholics flooded into the city, as they slowly inched their way to power through the ballot box, the Brahmins seemed caught in a malaise of spirit, the realization that Boston might be no longer theirs alone. By the 1860s, to escape the people they wanted to see assimilated into their way of life, many Brahmins moved out to Milton and Brookline, then nearly rural suburbs of Boston. They sent their children to their own private schools and created their own insular worlds in affluent gentlemen’s clubs. Inside these restricted communities, ensconced in such places as the Algonquin and the Somerset clubs, Brahmin society became more tightly organized and more impenetrable, and the Irish were kept safely at a distance well into the twentieth century. For many priests and politicians, the dividing line between the Irish and the Brahmins confirmed what the Boston Pilot, the diocese newspaper, concluded in 1850 when it said that “cooperation for any length of time in important matters between true Catholics and real Protestants is morally impossible.”